Is Empathy Dead Among the Left
What most people inside the media-elite liberal bubble haven’t been able to see is the experience of election night as it unfolded from the lived experience in “Middle America.” Working class conservatives went to bed (since they did, as a rule, have to wake up and go to work in the morning) with Trump having a comfortable lead and woke up to him having somehow lost due to very improbable ratios of Biden votes coming in out of the woodwork in the middle of the night. I’m not going to address at any greater length the issue of whether there was skullduggery involved, but… I hope that most of you out there have enough empathy and self-awareness left to be able to imagine the situation reversed and how this would make you feel…
When the mainstream media (based entirely in a few coastal cities) then went to extraordinary efforts to squash all investigation of just how this could happen, they seemed blissfully unaware that this was only going to give suspicions more weight. When Big Tech then weighed in even began to shut down Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube accounts of those with dissenting views… Can y’all imagine how this would make someone with strongly traditional values feel… someone who already feels perennially attacked by media and academic elites (who seem to delight in caricaturing Christians, conservatives, and rural people as stupid, bigoted, narrow-minded and poorly-educated redneck hicks…)
I’ve never been a Trump “fan” let alone “cultist,” but do any of you “liberals” out there have enough empathy left to see how the media-tech-academic-political establishments’ handling of this are playing into the hands of the most extreme of the conspiracy theorists? Especially in your attempts to shut off conversation about a number of legitimate issues, including a growing sense that something is not quite right about the election system, particularly in certain jurisdictions where there is essentially no opposition party capable of challenging questionable election practices. Cutting off speech is pretty much never a recipe for defusing tensions, because when people feel “cornered” by speech regulations, they tend to fight.
I think I’m being fairly reasonable, here. I fear that I will be rather shouted down or shut down for not contributing to the progressive echo chamber… If you progressive elitists out there are as successful as you seem to want to be at policing speech within your own echo chamber, though… then I think you will find that echo chamber shrinking, which will then make your own message increasingly unheard by those outside your own bubbles of “safe space.” Do you really think that you can shut down the speech of half the country? …or will you be more likely to end up marginalizing yourselves?